 Thank you all for coming along today to hear about the New Paris Agreement on climate change. Just this morning, Ban Ki-moon said, when talking about our future, together we sink or swim. And I think that this is no more true in any other context than climate change. Before kicking off, I'd like to very briefly introduce the hosts of this event and extend our gratitude for their support. This event is being hosted by the Cambridge Politics and International Studies Department, the Lordapact Centre for International Law, the Cambridge Centre for International Sustainable Development Law, the Law Faculty and the Centre for the Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Governance. Here on behalf of these organisations, we have co-chairs Dr De Pledge and Dr Göran. And our guest speaker today is Dr Cardonea Esedja. Thank you all for making this event possible. We're incredibly fortunate to have you here today and to be able to benefit from your significant expertise in this field. Dr De Pledge is an affiliated lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies here at Cambridge. Her main research interest lies in international climate change politics and negotiations. And in fact, Dr De Pledge is the author on the book on climate change, the International Climate Change Regime. Yeah, one of two authors. Dr De Pledge is a former staff member of the UN Climate Change Secretariat. She's also worked as a writer for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, reporting on climate change, ozone and biodiversity meetings. She currently serves on the editorial board of the journal's Climate Policy and Global Environmental Politics and manages the climate policy blog. Dr Göran is an expert in the Centre for European Legal Studies, a fellow and director of studies in law at Hughes and a fellow of the Lordapak Centre for International Law. He's previously served as a tutor in Sustainable Development Law and was a fellow in law at Robinson College in 2012. He's a visiting professor in several law faculties around the world and was formerly working at the Cambridge Politics and Environmental and International Studies Department. He is also an affiliated lecturer in the Department of Land Economy and a founding fellow of the Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Governance. And now I will hand over to our chairs, Dr De Pledge, to introduce our speaker, Larry Clare. Thank you very much for that introduction. Now I was very pleased to be asked to chair this meeting here today, which is aimed at giving us all a chance to reflect a little bit more deeply on the Paris Agreement. Now I was particularly pleased to be here because it's been what, six, seven weeks since the agreement was adopted and I like to think I know a little bit about climate change and I'm still in two minds about what I think about this agreement. On the one hand I know it's a real triumph for diplomacy and politics. There is no doubt about that at all. On the other hand, the INDCs, the national pledges within the Paris Agreement are simply not consistent with a climatically safe world. And something else that's quite important to me personally is that legally there is no doubt that at least for industrialised countries the Paris Agreement represents a step backwards from the previous set of targets they had in the Kyoto Protocol. So in that sense at least the Paris Agreement is actually going backwards rather than forwards. And I ask myself, how do I square this circle between the political triumph and a lot of the substantive weakness? Well I'm clearly in the right place to think about this, especially guided by such an esteemed and experienced guest lecturer as Marie Claire Cordiniasega, who hardly needs any introduction, but since it's my job let me remind you all that Marie Claire is an expert jurist, scholar and leader in international law and policy on sustainable development. She's the senior director for the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law and also chairs the Climate Law and Governance Consortium which convened a very important event, the Climate Law and Governance Day in Paris itself. She's a prolific writer, you'll all have read her work I'm sure, authored apparently 18 books and over 80 papers, I'd say it was probably more than that but this is what it says here. She also co-edits the CUP series on implementing sustainable development treaties, serves on several editorial boards as you'd expect, she's an affiliated fellow of the Laudepart Centre, advisor to CNERG and as well as these Cambridge appointments, she's an international professor in the Faculty of Law in Chile, a senior research associate for the Centre for International Forestry Research and rapporteur of the International Law Association's Natural Resources Committee. Now based on all of that as you'll expect she has, it says here 20 years of experience in international treaty negotiations and programmes spanning 79 countries, so not only experience in the international side of things but also in national implementation which as I'm sure all agree is particularly important post-Paris. She's an advisor to the UN Environment Programme and is fluent in several languages including English, French and Spanish. So with that introduction, Marie Claire, please come and take the floor. Marie Claire will be speaking for about half an hour, yeah, till about quarter to two, which will give us time then for some questions and we aim to wrap up at about five to two. Marie Claire, you have the floor. Thank you very much, Joanna. You know, I had no idea that you'd been with the ENB. The rest of your CV is legend but I hadn't been aware of that so I'm going to tell stories later about chemo. Hello and I guess Amanda, you deserve all thanks especially. We had an early version of this talk in the Loudapok Centre a couple of weeks ago and Amanda came to me afterward and said there are actually a few more people at the Law Faculty who would be interested in this and I said no, not really. You are proven correct, I am proven wrong, I believe you're interested now. Thank you so much for coming and for taking the time out from your very busy studies to talk about this agreement. I'm going to do two know your audience questions. How many people have laboriously and painstakingly read through the entire text of the tree? Oh, you're sad. Okay, that's too bad. My sympathy is for the ten of you put up your hand. The rest of you, quite reasonable. How many of you have ever been part of an event at a climate change conference of the parties? Yep, okay, well I expect that climate long governance accounts. Yes, obviously. Okay, good. We have a mix of experience in the room. Some people who don't spend all their time reading boring footnotes to equally boring international treaty language and some people who have buried themselves in the frequently depressing context of climate change negotiations, which recently hasn't been quite as depressing. I'm not going to answer the challenge that Joanna has put forward, except by my usual optimism in terms of whether or not the Paris Treaty can get us where we want to go. Partly because of my own view of international law and how it intersects with public policy and with governance systems. I think that international treaties can achieve a certain set of targets and provisions which governments have agreed to achieve. I think for the rest, we all need to be involved to actually make it happen. And that includes just as much national and local decision makers as it includes civil society, the private sector, investors, and others. So I'm not going to say can the Paris Agreement alone get us somewhere. What I'm going to say is this is what it does do and the framework that it sets in place. And now the question is implementation. And here's a few challenges we might want to consider. All right. So it's a bit of a nuanced answer. I think in terms of context, probably only time for two minor caveats slash footnotes. First, the lawyers in my research institute, which is a research and education charity based at McGill in Canada, but with folk here in Cambridge and Nairobi and in Santiago, Chile, we had lawyers on about 40 delegations advising their heads of state or their ministers. So my view is conditioned by their struggles. The high ambition coalition, the most vulnerable countries forum, the hunger strikes in Warsaw, the incredible shifts of position by the Philippines from we want to develop our oil. Thank you very much to we're forming a new coalition of most vulnerable countries. All of that drama is kind of part of for me what has gone into this text. The terrible failures in Copenhagen. The successes modest though they were in Cancun and in Durban. Even the earlier meetings, which we were involved in hosting in Montreal, the very first meeting of the protocol when we realized that it wasn't going to work, which for international lawyers is a little bit disappointing. That informs my view of the treaty. Some of what I tell you won't be found in the treaty text, I guess is what I'm saying. Second point equally important is that international cooperation is about more than law. International negotiations are about a grander type of politics. And in Paris that was hideously apparent for all the wrong reasons. And what I mean of course is that three weeks prior to the meeting of the world leaders, there were some terrible attacks. There was loss of life. The law faculty that co-hosted our event, Climate Law and Governance Day, lost family members, friends, close colleagues of their faculty itself and family of the students. And when the governments came together three weeks later, they were faced with the same kind of choice and it was apparent in every intervention and in every request made by the French chair that we probably haven't seen since the Doha trade negotiations were launched right after September 11th in the U.S. And it was actually a choice that we as a group were faced with as well as co-hosts of the law and governance stream of the discussions because essentially we were asked, are you going to cancel after this has happened? It's not safe in Paris. And we were reminded by our Parisian colleague and our South African colleague who probably had a right to say, if you cancel, who wins? And there's only one answer to that, right? So of course we didn't cancel and of course the world leaders turned up but of course they also understood that even above and beyond the horrific necessity of responding to climate change, there was a very clear message that could be sent or not sent by Paris about our ability to cooperate as an international community and that message was high politic. That message was not a kind of message that you can send in any other way except yes we will be here, yes we will cooperate, yes we will find a way through this problem as a world community. So we were in a very special moment in Paris. Three weeks after devastating terrorist attacks in a state of high uncertainty, negotiations suspended for five or six hours while bomb threats were dealt with, people told not to gather in groups of more than five because they might be a target, ministers being asked to fly by the name of undersecretary so that people wouldn't read your agenda online and turn up with all kinds of intentions. It was an awkward scenario but it was also an urgent one and it added a level of urgency which became very, very apparent during the meetings and the treaty end game. I promised you an overview of the Paris Agreement on climate change. For those who have spent weeks trawling through the various iterations of the text since the first versions came up out in the context of Lima and for those of us that are really sad and were even before that not just reading the various mechanisms that were being created by the parties after the failure in Copenhagen but also reading the bilateral agreement between China and the US that helped us right before Lima to see what those two countries might actually be able to agree to I will apologize if any of this does seem repetitive as opposed to a bit of a roadmap hopefully it's a useful roadmap. As most of you know under Article 2 the Paris Agreement aims to strengthen global response to the threat of climate change in the context of sustained involvement and efforts to eradicate poverty by holding the increase in global average temperatures to well below 2 degrees above industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5. Now anyone who's seen the newspaper is aware of the grand drama that was associated with that set of options, right? Even until the very last minute we had three different possibilities in the text under square brackets. I tend to be a bit agnostic about square brackets On the Monday of the final week of the negotiations I was speaking in the International Chamber of Commerce to a group of mainly international arbitrators and lawyers who admitted freely to me that they hadn't spent more than one or two build minutes on climate change in their lifetime and my chair, an amazing lady, truly was walking through the draft text that had come out and was counting square brackets she was actually counting square brackets one by one No, come on, you're bracketing one text and obviously she wanted to make a point at the end about the thousands that were in the text and I nudged her and I said I know you don't do much on climate change from my thought before but you know for those who are actually working on this we're aware there's only seven choices left in the whole text that are meaningful I just want you to know that so that you didn't stand up and you know, look silly and she said, thank you and you could see her abandon her effort to quit that was because we knew very well that those seven or eight choices that were meaningful do you or don't you hold people to the commitment on ensuring that human rights are respected in your adaptation of mitigation measures do you or don't you take a high ambition target do you or don't you include liability and compensation as well as recognition of loss and damage in the text those were the choices that were still remaining to be made and they were going to be made by heads of state at a certain moment the French presidency was going to be telephoning Obama and others and asking for permission to change their own negotiators position and that was what was required what does the treaty then do it accepts basically the highest possible ambition carefully worded to be sensitive to two sets of concerns one was the coalition of most vulnerable countries and high-emission countries that have built over the course of four or five months right before the agreement and their willingness to commit to something that was even higher ambition than two degrees and the other was the concerns of the 40 or so countries that because they don't have very large final emissions they don't have high emissions themselves as a country a lot of other countries think are irrelevant who are going to lose their very existence as countries if climate change isn't kept below 1.5 you can imagine most of the small and developing states that I'm referring to we had lawyers advising several of them they've been desperate now for many years but they're also getting really good at negotiating and what you find in the end is a recognition of that pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increased to 1.5 now anyone who does an analysis of the bottom-up 185 country action plans on climate change that were submitted as back before Paris intended nationally determined contributions can see very clearly that the commitments that governments were prepared to make in Paris were right before Paris won't get us there some of the numbers I've seen say that it will be around 3.7 degrees warning which means we lose not only all of those 40 countries and everyone's seen the papers lately becoming a migrant isn't really something that everyone aspires to and we also lose most of our coastal cities most likely so this is an issue, it's a problem but at the same time it's the best illustration of what those nationally determined contributions they lost the intended which I see is something that's actually quite positive in order to help us to understand what the bottom-up approach really means Article 3 brings in to the treaty framework those nationally determined contributions those climate action plans that are being registered by I think it's 188 countries now that have handed theirs in there's a slightly lower number of nationally determined contributions because the European Union sends theirs in as a block but essentially what you're dealing with then is a set of commitments not just for adaptation not just for mitigation but also for specific measures that they'll take that are widely diverse as a lawyer of course I noticed right away that almost all of them are talking about legal and institutional reform so that's a huge amount of work that's waiting for us just as people working on law but if you think about it in order to be able to implement commitments on energy, finance, agriculture, water, coastal zone management construction, transport you're talking about a change to an entire governance framework and a development plan of a country you're not talking about one small climate measure that we adopt in three years by putting it solely through our parliament I've helped countries to do that, I think that's a valuable thing to do but the nationally determined contributions mean more mean more and that's going to be huge that's going to be huge for the rest of our lives as people involved in this field if we take it seriously a lot of countries are already doing so, thank God given what's going on in the world alright so article three, we've got the nationally determined contributions we've got the commitment to prepare, communicate and maintain successive nationally determined contributions we have stock taking we have peer review we have processes written into the treaty at various articles whereby you take all of those publicly available national plans you add them up, you look at whether they're going to be effective you look at who's failing and you think of ways to help them that approach for those of us who have lived in Montreal or are familiar with the Montreal Protocol isn't a completely ineffective one it's a different one it's not binding targets with penalties that no one has the courage to enforce politically and we know they don't and that half the countries with a lot of emissions can't even sign on to because their own democratic governments won't let them it's something different it's an approach that I think is very much one of sustainable development where you're recognizing that countries may want to make these changes but most of them with four people in their environment who even know anything about climate change aren't in condition to just run ahead and do something effective indeed many of the things they do might turn out to be worse than what they already have and I've seen some stunning examples of that people facilitating the building of dykes and then realizing that the concrete of course created more emissions than their entire country for two years and benefited somebody's brother-in-law more than anybody else okay so in the treaty then we have the article 3 nationally determined contribution we have the understanding that we want it to reach measures that can guarantee us or at least make it possible to go well below two degrees of warming this is going to mean sinks it's going to mean capture it's going to mean actions that actually take greenhouse gas emissions out of our collective atmosphere not just limiting and changing our economy so that we're no longer producing as many it means a lot of things essentially and the reason that I was possibly quite stupidly suicidally even standing up even as early as last year and saying we are going to get a treaty alongside the general council of the UNFCC who was also saying that we're going to retire was because we could see that what they needed to do in the treaty and what they were proposing to do in the treaty was to drone together a series of already agreed mechanisms and make them work so in Warsaw we agreed a mechanism on loss and damage in Cancun we agreed a set of rules that could be applied along with safeguards for reducing emissions for deforestation and land degradation red and red plus right in Durban we agreed on the actual way forward but we also came to several other agreements in Lima we agreed on gender and education arrangements in Doha we agreed a gateway mechanism to be able to help facilitate transfer of technology the articles of the treaty that you can see when you read through it are based on and accepting of and bringing into the new agreement those already agreed mechanisms so they make it all part of what countries can use to reach their nationally determined contributions in article 3 and in particular to achieve the purpose of the treaty article 2 mitigation, adaptation and finance I promised Marcus I would populate this talk with anecdotes from negotiations it's a politics and a law discussion so here's one that might be kind of amusing research and independent NGOs such as people who are facilitating a climate law and governance day are given the funny specially coloured passes in Copenhagen most people who didn't have one of those funny specially coloured pass were told not to come in for the last two days because the police weren't aware of how to ensure that it was secure they hadn't expected 27,000 people so they were having a bit of a rough time and I remember in particular on behalf of the independent sort of research groups being asked to bear a pass for a day and being asked in particular to ensure that we were represented in a discussion about the structure of the future climate agreement which at that time people still thought was going to be signed in Copenhagen I walked through nine levels of security getting searched each time being told to leave different bags behind and when I came into the room there were only three seats left at the very front so I slipped in and sat down everybody smiled at me and didn't know why you're laughing because I'm late sit down and a gentleman who now has older white hair a lot of it and big sticking out ears comes up just as somebody says ladies and gentlemen the President of the United States of America oh right that's why we had to be represented and Barack Obama who had just come back from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo and made his way through Copenhagen on said the only thing the United States can agree to here and from what I understand from my discussions over the last 24 hours is a triangle the same triangle that's reflected in the treaty text actually I can tell you that however many years it is later it's going to be adaptation of mitigation commitments backed by a massive increase in finance that is needed to make those real and supported by transparency transparency was the code work for something that we all call verification monitoring reporting and verification actually and that transparency framework is one of four main mechanisms that I think the new Paris agreement brings us so first what Paris does by giving us articles 7 and articles 4 and articles 5 and 6 which help us to understand the commitments that are being made in this treaty on adaptation and on mitigation whether it's about using forest for mitigation or as a sink whether it's about taking into account of and collaborating on insurance for loss and damage is part of your adaptation these commitments are backed by a commitment to massively mobilize and direct now I actually find that quite exciting this idea of directing finance I don't know if many of you hang out with a lot of people in the city of London but I don't see a lot of directing going on by even governments of finance but I see a recognition in this treaty at article 9 that the financial resources that are needed are going to have to come from the economy as a whole and they're going to have to be redirected from where they're going currently now I know not everybody participates in divestment decisions nor should you have to but if we are looking at this as an actual transformation of the world economy towards something that over time peaks and then goes down in terms of the amount of emissions that it generates a low carbon, carbon constrained green economy whatever you want to call it then some of that finance that is currently going to carbon intensive investment is going to have to be redirected and the Paris treaty recognizes that it also then talks about even other parties developing countries article 9.3 and 9.2 providing financial support themselves voluntarily and here's another anecdote for you to make it real so there I was in the middle of I can't remember I think it must have been Cameroon and there was a parliamentarian who kept Wellington boots behind his desk because he was in charge of disasters national disasters he explained I'm Mr. Lecatastrophe I said wow that must make you popular in parliament and he said well they know I know all about it and he puts on the boots when he gets a call and he goes out there and he's the parliamentarian who's talking about this is a major problem we've just had all of this flooding we've just lost these three poster communities and he was in parliament arguing for the national budget to be putting 14% of its resources toward adaptation to climate change and you know he got it this is a country with however many percentage today I haven't read the human development report from December 15th with regards to Cameroon but we're looking at over 30% below the poverty line in any number that you're looking at and you're looking at employment that's high enough to create revolutions in France and they're still dedicating 14% of their national budget toward adaptation why because it's survival okay and they want to make sure that those resources which they are spending from their limited tiny pot are spent on effective mechanisms that is part of what Article 9 really means it goes beyond taking it seriously so this transparency global stock taking and peer review the mechanisms that are set up not just by Article 13 with the transparency provisions but also by the related aspects of the adoption decision and by Article 14 on the global stock take essentially mean that not only do we put the national contributions in their written form submitted by countries to the NFCC secretary and make them available to everyone but we sit down as countries together and we say hmm okay this is still at 3.4 degrees and if we don't do something according to the IPCC and our other scientists you'll be the US president who loses Florida we better announce that right away shall we and then they discuss how we can get a little bit tighter in our national contributions to maybe not be that guy or lady right and that happens for every country so the transparency the reporting the stock take the peer review and also the political consequences of that as the science becomes clearer coupled with a compliance mechanism a technology transfer and collaboration mechanism a sustainable development mechanism that looks a lot to me like a nationally determined contribution with the clean development mechanism from the Kyoto Protocol and taken into account but could be quite different and interesting all of these mechanisms together are to help the countries to meet their nationally determined contributions and go further right and if they're having trouble going further there's a compliance and implementation mechanism where they come together they admit that they're not meeting their objectives and they ask for help and there's funding made available to ensure that the 50,000 experts arriving on your door tomorrow with the UNDP and IDELO and UNEP and everybody else who feels like it coming and offering you help to get to your service I mean you might want to just try to meet your commitment to get rid of all these people right but the idea behind it is to work a little bit the same way that the nearly successful ozone treaty did and make the space for countries that are having trouble to admit it and to take on new actions new policies, new measures new laws, sure but also new science, new technologies all right and that's what the Paris Agreement sets up the implementation and compliance mechanism isn't conflicted it's not naming and blaming it's not saying you four people in the environment ministry didn't manage to convince your finance ministry colleagues today that this was important and so you're still spending money on oil and gas exploration you idiots because that doesn't get you anywhere in a sustainable development world I still think it's very valuable and I especially like it when NGOs do it because I think it helps people to understand the urgency of the matter and it's understood that blaming government is part of their job really but in the end it has to go deeper it has to be the countries and the societies themselves who like Mr. De Katastroff own the answer and are making it happen because they're actually committed to it and Paris unfortunately as a strength and as a weakness depends on that if people think that by finding this treaty they've saw climate change and go happily on to the next crisis we've lost now speaking as someone who is very comfortable with failure at the moment after 17 years of deadlock knowing that our international treaty under Kyoto wasn't going to happen it wasn't going to work it was doing the opposite of eliminating the world emissions to something safe maybe I'd be perfectly happy about that but say I could be but the most vulnerable countries the ones who are actually going to lose their entire territory the equally we've got a lot to lose developed countries that are going to lose billions and billions of dollars of investments and damage in their own countries hopefully they won't because they'll have realized what changes need to be made and they'll be serious about them they do those actors under Paris are not just intended to come together they're almost forced to it the structure of the agreement itself forces them to be accountable for what their country is or is not achieving in terms of emission reductions in terms of carbon sinks in terms of adaptation measures in terms of ways of addressing loss and damage for their citizens in a way that takes into account human rights put that in for Mary Robinson it made it into the preamble but equity also made it into the purpose and that's actually huge in terms of what we can achieve so then the paper that I'm presenting today takes a look using the lens of the New Delhi declaration principles of international law that were gleaned from a study of about 300 treaties and about 20 years of jurisprudence from international courts of tribunals and most of the literature and the Rio declaration among other soft law instruments the seven New Delhi principles include the duty of states to ensure sustainable use of natural resources the principle of equity and eradication of poverty the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and you can take into account different national circumstances and different capabilities under that one the principle of the precautionary approach the principle of public participation access to information and justice the principle and the principle that economic development is to integrate the social and environmental aspects of that development can't be externalized anymore those seven principles when one does a study of the treaty one finds in spades they're guiding the decisions all the way through in terms of public participation and access to information and justice just to pick one paragraph 14 recognizes that without that public participation without that access to information without that accountability mechanism that societies need to be able to apply we won't have success in the new framework established by Paris we won't have the global response to climate change that are needed it sets up new public participation mechanisms it recognizes in article 12 that there will be an enhanced education training, public awareness, public access to information, public participation throughout the nationally determined contributions and the societies that have adopted them and are using them to shape their economies what we actually need to take a look at and think about a little bit more even though access to justice is actually not addressed directly in terms of countries being able to take each other or others to court in the ICJ parties are expected to access the same dispute settlement mechanisms as the UNFCCC itself and that does refer to the ICJ but in very specific and limited circumstances never been used, not even for advisory opinions in spite of the efforts of Tuvalu and Sri Lanka and others so what we have to really think about here in terms of loss and damage in terms of liability and compensation those western room lawyers is what's the best way do you try to get a law government to account so it has to compensate you do you try to get the foxes who are in charge of the hen house to come up with a Mia Copa framework or do you go through private law, do you go through litigation the lawyers that met in climate law and governance day were actually very clear about this, they said we don't expect the treaty to get us liability and compensation, the chances of countries like the US signing on to that when they're a monist legal system and the law can be directly applied in Washington the day after the treaty signed, this isn't going to happen but we're helping countries like Tuvalu to adopt compensation acts which if you then sued in New York or London would be the law applied to whether or not there's been loss and damage and we think that's a valuable contribution they said I need to think about that a little bit more I remember in a conversation with the OECD on an investment panel a few years ago in The Hague hearing from a lady who said it's just impossible that we have anything on liability and compensation loss and damage yes but liability no and I said oh absolutely I think you're right probably if someone was really worried about loss and damage they could just sue in Mississippi like we did on tobacco bit of a lengthy process, thousand and thousand court cases later and a whole lot of damages eventually they got there and she looks at me and she says what well you know that's what happens if governments can't come to an agreement everybody goes to their own courts and eventually someone wins or gender case similar in Pakistan just recently I hear you know that would be an interesting way for it to develop maybe it would be better if we had a multilateral agreement on this I said I agree with your earlier statement I don't think you're going to get one you're going to have to talk to their volunteers good luck on that in development in Paris that even though we got recognition of loss and damage even though we got recognition of the need to collaborate on insurance what we didn't get was an acceptance of liability and compensation what we also fortunately didn't get was a strict and clear limit on any liability and compensation essentially the adoption decision provision if I'm reading it correctly and my colleagues are correct from England as others who worked on it simply says the treaty is silent on this the treaty doesn't give any new rights and it doesn't refer to this and you know take away any of those rights either I think that's as good as they could have gotten okay I've watched you through the treaty I've explained why I see some glimmers of hope there I'll flag that they have a cute little statement in the preamble that says that some countries care about climate justice it's in the same provision as it talks about the countries that care about mother earth so I think I can probably guess who's who in that crowd but it'll be interesting to see what over the years this all comes to mean what I think we need to take home as a concluding message is that one, the implementation quite deliberately depends on the efforts of all the countries that were in the room that made the commitment not just their governments but their universities their investors their civil society activist groups their politics departments their research centers yeah so that's the first one if the implementation fails this time the treaties make space for everybody but that also means it's all on us very different world than the traditional vision of international law right where you can comfortably blame the government alone the second thing the second thing that I would like to suggest I've spoken specifically about the climate change agreement there's a regime many regimes overlapping that have been built around this agreement alongside there's a whole set of international economic law human rights law environmental law that is equally relevant so embedded situated in a broader scheme of obligations that would be my second main point where I think future research is needed but I also think we need to be very clear if your investment agreement discourages certain types of investments in accordance with national policy and encourages renewables that investment agreement I think is trying to support Paris serves to be encouraged and then my third take home message probably the most exciting one at least for someone like me is that in all of these nationally determined contributions and then there are five year global stock taking and review process it's going to be up to us as a research community to help with the spotting of errors to help with the collation of data to help with the whether this measure works and why and under what conditions and how to make it better and training the people who will make it better so the bottom up approach that is adopted by Paris that we review see how we're doing help each other to do a better job assume that people do want to meet their commitments in international law that's actually the principle of international law by the way and assume that what's happening is that we're not still strong enough as a world community as countries as governments as actors to do it and we need to help each other that bottom up approach might actually be a new way of making and implementing international law bring it on thank you fascinating talk I think I'm very little bit more towards the optimistic side now although I still have a few doubts in my mind so we have some time for questions I think I'll take I anticipate quite a few so I think maybe I'll take two or three at a time and you can respond to those in one so who'd like to get the full rolling yes please just in reference to your second concluding point about the context of the legal frameworks and my understanding this is a that's where energy needs to be focused how the implementation of legally binding treaties like TPP, TTSA are going to be operationalising the targets which can take us towards away from the kind of actions you want from Paris Equipment and so looking at those legally binding treaties is actually where people who come from this politics should be applying their energies because that's where the legally binding treaties are and that's a good response to that okay I think there was a question yes please thanks for your very insight the speech and I would like to specifically in relation to the indigenous people and the climate change could you elaborate a little bit more about your observation and what are things that you added in this yeah very interesting point yes thank you okay another one back to that that makes I was just wondering very clear if you could elaborate a little bit more on the fact that the enforcement branch that was in Kyoto was not taken up again I understand that generally that's politically more difficult than we're going towards a facilitated you know agreement but I'm just wondering what the impact could be okay nice range of questions yeah it is actually I'm just realizing that among the documents that I left in my kitchen counter was the copy of the treaty itself luckily the paper cites it in at non-games actually probably but okay so starting with the issue of economic instruments and economic treaties in particular man after my own heart because of course that's one of my main areas of research and I do you're absolutely brilliant thank you and I think in particular what I think international economic agreements do and one of the strengths that I think we can draw from those regimes whether it's the sort of large mega regionals or whether it's a small bilateral between Central America and the European Union or Canada Mexico and the USA is a deal there's an economic deal that's being given there which from a sustainable development perspective should not be discounted the idea that we will give you market access peru to the US bilateral trade agreement but only if you're willing to accept certain transparency and other provisions to ensure that the wood arriving isn't illegally logged so that our market isn't becoming the incentive for denuding of your forests and climate change now I'm actually citing obviously from a real trade agreement where there is such a set of provisions and there has been resources put toward inspections of exact shipments to find out whether the wood was illegally logged it's not helping the grand problem of illegal logging but it's starting to move toward a globalization that means something where just as you're not supposed to take illegal timber as your business model from the US forest you also can't do it improve and sell it in the US I do see that as positive but and this is where I get to my second point on the economic agreements legally binding etc they're also facilitative in a special way you can look at a trade relationship or an investment relationship between two countries or even an entire region and you can point to what products are being traded which ones will probably increase if you take down the tariff barriers by this much what their social environmental impacts are we even have sustained really impact assessments environmental reviews environmental assessments we call them in Canada but what we actually do is meaningless what we can see there is a possibility of looking at specific trade flows specific investment flows in specific products or services and an intervention point at the border we either tariff you or we don't and by this much departments of investment promotion etc we either incentivize you or we make it more difficult through additional quote red tape and that is a very special contribution I'm talking in terms of renewable energy and climate change but you can look equally at some of our other biodiversity desertification or other large conventions so I believe that these have to be firmly linked I don't see any argument as an international lawyer to someone who is holding up well you know that's just your idea that illegal logging isn't a good idea number one it's illegal in their country ok so don't tell me you support it and then number two of course we've got all of these binding multilateral almost universal treaties which say that we're trying to reduce this from being done with the Paris agreement we say we're trying to get carbon sinks through forest so all we're doing here is we're using that one intervention of trade policy to be able to achieve that specific cut in the flow of illegally harvested timber and change those incentives great yes it's a good start and is it binding only as much as the people who are signing the agreement and able to control the trade can make a binding if all you've done is deviate the trade to China where it can be used for even fair trade or FSC certified would because 40% can come from unknown sources we haven't tightened the system enough so that is the caveat and also the weakness of that argument but I think it is an important part of it we had a quick question on Indigenous Peoples' Rights and I'll try to address it quickly the Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples' Rights Vicky was actually on the panel that we hosted on the final day of the climate negotiations on Friday and she was incredibly eloquent about not just what Indigenous Peoples' Rights meant in the context of this treaty in terms of adaptation, mitigation, finance participation in decision making and why it was so important that any measure that a government takes on climate change has to take into account and involve Indigenous people but she also spoke very very well about the contributions that Indigenous people can and do make ready to adaptation mitigation and she said that even though the measures that were being contemplated in the preamble of the treaty and are there saying that we need to respect and consider and integrate, take into account Indigenous Peoples' Rights and all human rights in our measures she said that only gets you halfway she said that Indigenous Peoples are players and they should actually be able to be part of the efforts and they should be recognized for the part they play and I think she was very wise in saying that it means that Indigenous Peoples who care about human rights aren't confined to that one provision of the preamble and a reference to equity in Article 2 they're part of the public participation arrangements they're part of the adaptation arrangements they're part of the technology transfer arrangements when we talk about traditional knowledge that can be shared so they're part of the entire treaty the question that I'm going to be asking the folk who are designing the rules for the financing and especially the global finance funds is okay so what does that mean in terms of funding also being provided I think that's still going to be one of the areas where it becomes more clear or not when we look at the rules of those funds and who can apply and how because in some countries just the fact that it's only your national government that can apply makes it inaccessible right so that's going to be I think one of the key issues that we need to look for here in terms of enforcement and the Kyoto Protocol I have a friend who's working on a paper on exactly this topic and she and her entire research group don't have an answer yet what what I can't help coming back to as an international lawyer who actually cares about sustainable development is that if a mechanism hasn't been working I'm not sure how long we want to flag the dead force and I realize that's a bit controversial because I fully sympathize with the people who want binding targets and penalties and let's be and there's some really innovative work around clubs whether they're faster that I think is really worth looking at there where binding agreements are taken between those who will and those treaties are respected as well and become part of the effort but somewhere along the line I've worked in too many countries to really believe that it's all about oh we just can't be bothered I see major gaps in funding I see major gaps hypocritical gaps in capacity I see incentives being offered to oil companies as long as they're from somebody's country and barriers being put up to renewables because they're from the EU and not the US or whatever else the reason is and I think somewhere along the line even stupid things like jurisdictions where oh we can't possibly do wind because our country and their country are shaped like this and so we've got to have a nuclear facility here because we can't get the wind from them okay at some point we're going to need to take a more cooperative and facilitative approach to this if it doesn't work we're going to need a much stronger world government before we can make our enforcement mechanisms work correctly either that or we're going to have to look at something like the WTO where you know the membership has its privileges idea but the economic incentives make it impossible for a country not to eventually comply because I'm not certain the penalties thing having watched my country withdraw humiliatingly from Kyoto in order not to pay their bill after they lost the poker game yeah thank you very much Marie Claire unfortunately I think we are out of time I think another group wanting to come into but this is definitely a conversation that will keep going for many months many years to come so I'm sure you'll all want to join me in thank you thank you Marie Claire very much for giving up her lunch hour to enlighten us I'd like to thank all of you also on behalf of the law faculty especially Joanna colleague from Polis to joining this conversation we see it more as a start of a conversation rather than the end someone David Randall said you know the Paris Agreement is actually the beginning it's not the end of something it's the beginning of a huge new era and I think if we see it in that spirit there's lots more work that needs to be done thank you very much to all of you and please be in touch